I should write more about America and us naked in a river.
You called me a coward as you pulled off your clothes.
Not wanting to be a coward, I pulled off my clothers
The midnight of a night slipping
—from “Love Poem without Light,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first poem I wrote that made me feel like a poet spanned 14 sections and over 30 pages. I had read The ...
I hide from people. I have a big nose & don’t brush
my teeth. My silhouette is long, splattered
with lumps, bulging. This is to say: I’m ugly,
I want to be unique. Since I was little,
I’ve loved goblin sharks, their trapdoor jaws
—from “Self-Portrait as Goblin Shark,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece I wrote was a sort of ode to the streetlamps outside the dorm I stayed at in my first year at Florida State. I was taking an intro to poetry class and we were reading the early modernists, so it had all that high brow poetry voice stuff. I believe the first line was “Core of hot yellow, shine out!”
...
I don't want to pluck my burr from your flesh
nor do I want to be kind Or if I am to be kind,
I want to be a kind of chameleon,
night-blue flourescent.
—from "When Nothing Else Will Do," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I can’t recall the year but when I wrote “How I Learned Where We Come From”, it led me to recognize that I had an “original voice”. The poem is...
When Jesus casts demons into pigs,
they leap from steep banks
to sea. Some translations suggest
lake. The water, salt or fresh,
muffles a mania of snouts.
—from “Pigs that Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I started writing in earnest, in middle school, I wrote by hand in journals and spiral notebooks that are likely currently decomposing in a Los Angeles landfill. That time in my life was tumultuous and difficult, and I journaled and poemed to carry myself through it. Because trauma does strange things to the brain, I don’t remember anything I wrote then; probably I was bouncing between...
Lovely as milk, smooth as a knell,
bodiless and meade of breaths,
a blue bed of pollen,
lace, mesh, the sea ran
like a prayered tongue, the waves
—from “The City Opposite Nineveh,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was younger we moved around India a lot, and so I went to a handful of different schools. An English vocabulary test was usually a part of the application to these schools, where you had to write an essay using all the words from a provided word bank. Those essays were my first pieces.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I’d wager my most formative influence is Virginia Woolf. More...
